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PARTY and PATRONAGE" 



AN ADDRESS 
PREPARED FOR THE ANNUAL MEETING OF 



The National Civil-Service Reform League 



(APRIL 28, 1892.*) 



BY THE PRESIDENT 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



PUBLISHED FOR THE 

NATIONAL CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM LEAGUE 

1892 



Publications of the National Civil-Service Reform League 

Proceedings at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil-Ser- 
vice Reform League, 1882, with address by George William 
Curtis. Per copy, 10 cts. 

The same for '84, '85, '86, '87, '89, '90, '91 and '92. Per copy, 
8 cts. Per ioo, . . , . . . $5 oo 

The Year's Work in Civil-Service Reform. (Address of 1884.) By 
George William Curtis. 

Civil-Service Reform under the present National Administration. 

(Address of 1885.) By George William Curtis. 

The Situation. (Address of 1886.) By George William Curtis. 

Address to the Voters of the United States. By George William 
Curtis. 

The Selection of Laborers. By James M. Bugbee ot the Mass. C. 
S. Commission. 

The same in German. 

Report of the Special Committee on the present Condition of 

the Reform Movement, March 16, 1887. 
Civil Service Reform as a Moral Question. By Chas. J. Bonaparte. 

Per 100, . . . . . 60 cts. 

Constitution of the National Civil- Service Reform League. 
Also a few copies of some early publications. 



PUBLICATIONS OF THE NEW YORK CIVIL-SERVICE 
REFORM ASSOCIATION. 



II. The Beginning of the Spoils System in the National Gov- 
ernment, 1829-30. (Reprinted, by permission, from Parton's 
"Life of Andrew Jackson.") Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100, $3 00 

III. The Spoils System and Civil-Service Reform in the Custom- 

House and Post-Office at New York. By Dorman B. Eaton. 
136 pages, 8vo. Per copy, 15 cts. Per 100, . . $10 00 

IV. Civil-Service Reform in the New York Custom-House. By 

Willard Brown. Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100, . . . $3 00 

V. Term and Tenure of Office. By Dorman B. Eaton. Per copy, 25 cts. 

Second edition, abridged. Per copy, 15 cts. Per 1 00, . $10 00 

VII. The Danger of an Office-Holding Aristocracy. By E. L. 

Godkin. Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100, . . $3 00 

Daniel Webster and the Spoils System. An extract from Senator 
Bayard's oration at Dartmouth College, June, 1882. Per copy, 
Per 100, ...... 



3 cts. 
$1 50 






PARTY and PATRONAGE" 



AN ADDRESS 



PREPARED FOR THE ANNUAL MEETING OF 



The National Civil-Service Reform League 



(APRIL 28, 1892.) 



BY THE PRESIDENT 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



^ OF C 



PUBLISHED FOR THE 

NATIONAL CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM LEAGUE 

1892 



O* 



JV 



^ 



PRESS OF 

Geo. Gottsberger Peck, 

ii murray st., n. v. 



PARTY AND PATRONAGE. 



t 



An Address at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil- 
Service Reform League in Baltimore y April 28, 1892. 



By George William Curtis. 



If Charles Lamb had been an American by birth, as he is 
certainly an American by affectionate literary adoption, he would 
have added probably to his list of Popular Fallacies the pleasing 
delusion that a republic is a self-adjusting system of liberty and 
equal rights, and that to upset a throne is to set up justice. When 
Voltaire was insulted by the London mob for being a French- 
man, an offence which John Bright said is forgiven by John Bull 
only with the greatest reluctance, the Frenchman turned upon the 
steps as he entered the door, and, with exquisite sarcasm, appealed 
to the nobleness of the English character, and complimented the 
mob upon their institutions and love of liberty. Voltaire knew 
that in England the surest appeal was to the national self-com- 
placency, a virtue which is not wanting to the English-speaking 
race wherever it is found. 

But although we may justly claim that a republic, upon the 
whole, secures fairer play for every man than any other govern- 
ment, it is not necessary, as in a disputed election, to claim every- 
thing. However it may be in Maryland, in New York the 
establishment of a republic by our fathers, while it has secured a 
fairer general chance for all men, has not yet developed universal 
political virtue or absolutely honest government. Like all excel- 



lent human devices, the administration of government must be 
constantly and carefully repaired and improved. If a locomotive 
upon a railroad must be watched with incessant care and be 
scrupulously oiled and burnished, in order effectively to do its 
work ; if even a chronometer must be regularly wound, if it is to 
report accurately the time of day ; if a slight derangement of the 
machinery brings the huge, humming factory to silence, it is a 
fond delusion that popular forms of government alone will secure 
honest and equitable administration. 

In the nineteenth year of our constitutional union Fulton 
essayed with steam to force his little vessel, the Clermont, up the 
Hudson River to Albany. It was an experiment in mechanics, 
but no more an experiment than the republic in politics. Inces- 
sant care, comprehensive observation, intelligence, discretion, 
shrewd modification of details, perpetual deference to the hints of 
experience, a thoughtful care which has not yet ceased, all these 
have developed Fulton's struggling, doubtful Clermont, pushing 
its way upon a smooth stream to Albany in thirty-two hours, into 
the magnificent marine palace that crosses the turbulent ocean in 
five times thirty-two hours. Much more was necessary to this 
marvellous development than the invention of the steam engine 
and the application of steam to navigation. Very much more is 
necessary to honest government, to the security of liberty, the 
equality of rights, and the general welfare, than a republican form 
of government. Among the Zulus to-day a republic would hardly 
prosper. In Bourbonized France a hundred years ago a republic 
was a saturnalia of wrong and blood. Wendell Phillips, seeing 
only the cause and the result, the inhuman tyranny that produced 
the French revolution, and the relaxed grasp of despotism that fol- 
lowed it, called it " the most unstained and wholly perfect blessing 
Europe has had in modern times." However that may be from 
the orator's point of view, the French republic of 1793, the 
fierce outbreak of a people imbruted by unspeakable oppression, 
was itself an awful revenge in kind. Even great as is the prog- 



ress and marvellous the recuperative force of the French people, 
and fair their future prospect, the republic is built upon volcanic 
ground, and may yet reel with earthquake shocks. 

Mont Blanc, the sovereign Alp-, has not a charm to stay the 
morning star, and the American republic, greatest and best of all 
republics, has no more power than the Roman republic by its 
name alone to secure freedom and wise progress. It is but an 
instrument, and its beneficent efficiency depends upon the intelli- 
gence, character and conscience of the people who wield it, and 
upon the promptitude and skill with which it is kept in repair and 
adjusted to the changing conditions of its operations. The de- 
mand of reform in methods of administration of government, 
therefore, is not revolutionary, nor Quixotic, nor surprising. It 
is the sign of a healthy and progressive political life. It is not 
exceptional, but, on the contrary, it is familiar in every kind of 
human activity. It is the impulse of the instinct which constantly 
seeks something better, 

" The desire of the moth for the star, 
Of the night for the morrow ;" 

the instinct which stimulates medical science to the discovery of 
more certain relief for the physical pain and suffering of man- 
kind, which produces endless mechanical inventions, increases 
the knowledge of occult forces and their practical application to 
human convenience, arrests the vast and needless waste of vital- 
ity that lesser knowledge cannot stay ; which lightens labor and 
lengthens life by greater command of time and space. 

Why should this beneficent inspiration be lost to the sphere 
of politics which is not a less universal concern than all these ? 
When human ingenuity is busily improving sewing machines and 
type-writers, steam engines, telephones and electric lights, and 
every mechanical and industrial process, why should methods of 
administration and government not be supposed susceptible of 



improvement ? As the Arabian Nights and the old fairy stories 
are but delightful prophecies of our modern world of larger intelli- 
gence and shrewder wit, where we are wafted from place to place 
upon an enchanted carpet and in a chair of magic, where Ispahan 
converses with Istamboul, and a drop of elixir deadens pain, so 
Plato's republic, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and Harring- 
ton's Oceana, and all the ideal commonwealths of the poets and 
philosophers are but vague forecasts of states not further from 
ours than ours from those of early history. 

Yet the world is not a garden of the Hesperides where we 
have only to raise our hands and pluck the golden fruit of prog- 
ress. Progress, on the contrary, is everywhere the Golden Fleece 
to be won only by hard contention, by taming fire-breathing bulls 
of stupidity, by slaying dragons of malignity, and by victoriously 
withstanding hosts of slanderers and liars sprung from the teeth 
of venomous serpents. If the application of the humane discov- 
eries of science and the advance of the comfort and convenience 
of modern civilization have been resisted as stoutly as if they were 
a pestilence or a consuming cloud of locusts, it is not surprising 
that every political reform is ridiculed as visionary and denounced 
as incendiary. This has been so universally the welcome of im- 
provement in every department of human interest that it may be 
said almost that the presumption is in favor of every proposed 
reform, and that reputed quacks and tiresome fanatics are prob- 
ably new Columbuses and Galileos and Jenners, the latest bene- 
factors of mankind. It is this jealous distrust of progress which 
led so sagacious a statesman as Lord Shelburne to say : " The 
moment the independence of America is agreed to by our gov- 
ernment the sun of Great Britian is set, and we shall no longer be 
a powerful or respectable people," and even Richard Henry Lee 
called the framers of the American Constitution " visionary young 
men." These gentlemen were very positive, but it was only their 
rhetorical way of saying " here is a change," and change to cer- 
tain conservative temperaments means only mischief. But the 



challenge of conservatism to the spirit of progress has this ad- 
vantage, that it compels every change to prove its right by show- 
ing its reason. 

The uncertain fortune of reform in politics, fluctuating be- 
tween sudden success and long delay, is well explained by a re- 
mark of Fisher Ames that " the only constant agent in political 
affairs are the passions of men ; " and by what Gardiner, the latest 
and masterly historian of the great civil war in England, says of 
the Presbyterianism of Prynne, that it enlisted on the side of the 
average intellect of the day, " which looked with suspicion on 
ideas not yet stamped with the mint mark of custom, the feeling 
which unconsciously exists in the majority of mankind of repug- 
nance against all who aim at higher thinking or purer living than 
are deemed sufficient by their contemporaries, and who usually, in 
the opinion of their contemporaries, contrive to miss their aim." 
But existing order consists always of ideas which are stamped 
with the mint mark of custom, and the hope of progress, there- 
fore, lies in the ideas which are not yet authenticated at the mint. 
The Bourbon despotism is France, the Stuart abuses in England, 
the supremacy of the Crown in Colonial American, had the mint 
mark of custom. Had no other coinage been demanded these 
coined abuses would have remained the sole currency. Political 
progress, and with it larger liberty and higher general welfare, are 
secured only by bringing fresh bullion to be stamped with the 
mint mark. In the ever- spreading tree of political life it is dis- 
trust of the established order, not acquiescence in it, which is the 
irritation of the stem that shows the spot where the new growth 
will spring. 

Progress in the legal security of liberty has been always ef- 
fected by regulating the executive power which is the final force 
in all politically organized communities. The Great Charter, the 
Grand Remonstrance, the Petition of Right in England, were 
all declarations against the arbitrary exercise of executive 
power, and steadily diminished by jealous popular care, this 



8 

x< ^power gradually became mainly the arbitrary control of patronage. 
For this arbitrary control the English tory has always a plausible 
plea, and in the middle of the last century when England had 
been freshly reminded by Culloden and the romantic enthusiasm 
for Prince Charles that the Hanoverian throne was not yet secure, 
David Hume in his essay upon the Independency of Parliaments, 
made a better argument for patronage under the British Constitu- 
tion than could ever be made for it under ours. It was essential, 
he said, to the balance of the constitution. The House of Com- 
mons did not assert its supremacy over the other branches of the 
government only because it did not think it its interest to do 
so. The patronage of the crown, he said, with the aid of honest 
members alone maintained the royal power. That is to say, 
the King bought votes enough to supplement the votes of his 
friends. " We may call this influence," he says, for Hume was an 
honest man, " by the invidious appellations of corruption and de- 
pendence, but some degree and some kind of it are inseparable 
from the very nature of the constitution, and necessary to the 
preservation of our mixed government." 

Mr. Lecky points out the coincidence of Hume's view with 
that of Paley, who attributes the loss of the American colonies to 
the want of royal patronage extensive enough, as he says," to coun- 
teract that restless, arrogating spirit which in popular assemblies, 
when left to itself, will never brook an authority that checks and 
interferes with its own." This is the tribute of the moral Philosopher 
to the necessity and reasonableness of the spoils system, a tribute 
which is echoed in the political gossip according to Tammany Hall 
as recently set forth under the name of the eminent political 
moralist, Mr. Richard Croker, in the North American Review^ 
a plea, I may add, which was promptly and thoroughly exposed 
by our friend and associate, Mr. Dorman B. Eaton. 

Our fathers were largely children of the Englishmen who 
with great gyves of reform bound the royal prerogative ; and the 
American Declaration of Independence in legitimate succession 



from Magna Charta and the Grand Remonstrance was an arraign- 
ment of the abuse of executive power. Our Colonial politics 
were in large part a contest over patronage between the royal 
governors and the colonial legislatures, The destruction of the 
statue of George the Third in the Bowling Green at New York, 
at the beginning of the Revolution, was symbolic of the instinc- 
tive distrust of executive power by the colonists. The crown was 
the emblem of executive oppression, and when the Republic be- 
gan in the formation of the first state constitution during the 
revolution the chief distinction of those constitutions was at the at- 
tempted restraint of that power by distribution between the Leg- 
islature or the Council and the Governor. With the same jeal- 
ousy the framers of the Constitution in establishing the National 
Government limited the executive power of appointment. They 
provided that only with the advice and consent of the Senate 
should the President appoint certain specified officers, while Con- 
gress should provide at its pleasure for the appointment of others. 
The Constitution thus reserves to the Senate a practical veto upon 
the appointing power and to Congress the designation of the 
methods of appointment of all inferior officers. 

The people had assumed their own government, but as they 
could not administer it directly it was administered by agents se- 
lected by party or the organized majority, but under such restric- 
tion as the whole body of voters, or the people, might impose. 
The crown had vanished. There was no king or permanent 
executive. There were a President and Legislature elected by 
the people for limited terms. But the practical agency of the gov- 
ernment was party and whoever might be elected President, party 
remained in the administration as permanent as a king and with 
the same control of the executive power. But the executive power 
whether in the hands of a king or a party does not change its na- 
ture. It seeks its own aggrandizement and cannot safely be trusted. 
Buckle says that no man is wise enough and strong enough to be 
vested with absolute authority. It fires his brain and maddens 



IO 

him. But this which is true of an individual is not less true of an 
aggregate of individuals or a party. A party or a majority needs 
watching as much as a king. Indeed, that such distrust is the 
safeguard of Democracy against Despotism is a truth as old as 
Demosthenes. Like a sleuth-hound distrust must follow execu- 
tive power however it may double and whatever form it may as- 
sume. It is as much the safeguard of popular right against the 
will of a party as against the prerogative of a king. Distrust is, 
in fact, the instinct of enlightened political sagacity which sees 
that the peril of popular institutions lies in the abuse of the forms 
of popular government. The great common place of our politi- 
cal speech, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, is fundament- 
ally true. It is a scripture essential to political salvation. The 
demand for civil service reform is the cry of that eternal vigilance 
for still further restriction by the people of the delegated executive 
power. 

Civil Service Reform, therefore, is but another successive step 
in the development of liberty under law. It is not eccentric nor 
revolutionary. It is a logical measure of political progress. In the 
light of larger experience and adjusted to the exigencies of a repub- 
lic in the nineteenth century instead of a monarchy in the thirteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, in the spirit of the wise jealousy of the 
constitution, in the interest of free institutions and of honest gov- 
ernment, it proposes to restrict still further the executive power 
as exercised by party. It is a measure based upon the observation 
of a century during which government by party has developed 
condition and tendencies and perils which could not have been 
forseen in detail, although at the beginning of party government 
under the constitution, Washington said of party spirit " it exists 
under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, con- 
trolled or repressed; but in those of popular form, it is seen in its 
greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy." 

The experience of a century has justified Washington's words. 
The superstition of divine right has passed from a king to a party, 



and the old fiction of the law in monarchy thaf the king can do 
no wrong has become the practical faith of great multitudes 
in this republic in regard to party. Armed with the arbitrary 
power of patronage party overbears the free expression of the 
popular will and entrenches itself in illicit power. It makes the 
whole civil service a drilled and disciplined army Whose living de- 
pends upon carrying elections at any cost for the party which con- 
trols it. Patronage has but to capture the local primary meeting 
and it commands the whole party organization. Every member 
of the party must submit or renounce his party allegiance, and 
with it the gratification of his political ambition, and such is the 
malign force of party spirit that in what seems to him a desperate 
alternative he often supports men whom he distrusts and methods 
which he despises lest his party should be defeated. He takes 
practically the position that party loyality requires him to support 
one party with bad measures and unfit candidates rather than risk 
the success of another party with good measures and suitable 
men. 

This devotion of party, not to the ends for which it exists but 
to the spoils that accompany success at the polls, has become 
so absolute that it has produced an evil greater than any which 
party proposes to remedy. In order to secure and maintain party 
power, a corruption has been introduced which involves not only 
the whole system of our politics, but the character of the people. 
It is a corruption so general and so familiar that an amendment 
to the constitution is proposed in Congress, which contemplates 
the election of Senators of the United States by the popular vote 
of the State instead of the vote of the Legislature, and the argument 
gravely urged for the amendment is that it is harder to corrupt the 
whole people than to buy a legislature. Familiar incidents of the 
last Presidential campaign, the collection of an immense sum of 
money by party managers to be spent without audit or accounting 
of any kind, and the general public conviction that it was a simple 
corruption fund not only spent for illicit purposes, but by which high 



12 

office was bought, and the equally general conviction that if the 
other party could have procured the same sum of money it would 
have done the same thing, show how wide-spread the evil has 
become. 

A New York morning paper of the highest character recently 
published the remark of a conspicuous politician whose name was 
given, that, " two-fifths of the Democratic voters of the State are 
represented in conventions by delegates selected by the heads of 
the various departments in New York and King's County," that 
is to say in the cities of New York and Brooklyn. An evening 
paper of the same day, speaking of the Republican nomination 
for the Governorship in Rhode Island, said, " it is notorious in 
the State that every Republican candidate must pay for his honor, 
and the price has heretofore ranged from $20,000 to $40,000. 
* * * It has frequently happened that a second assessment 
has been necessary when the election by the people has failed and 
the choice has fallen upon the Legislature." These statements are 
not disputed and they are not doubted. They are read languidly 
by many readers as illustrations of the rottenness of politics. 
They are read with alarm by many others as signs of a taint that 
• will rot the whole system if not extirpated. The wrong is not pe- 
culiar to any party, for its source is the party spirit which all 
parties stimulate and Washington foresaw. The Pot indeed sol- 
emnly rebukes the Kettle, but when traders in mules denounce 
traders in blocks of five for political corruption, we instinctively 
recall the legendary Roman augurs and the stage direction in 
Robert the Devil, " infernal laughter." 

This monstrous development of the party system in a Repub- 
lic while it might have been vaguely anticipated could not have 
been definitely forseen. The American who had served under 
Washington in the field and had voted for him as President, al- 
though he may have seen in the malice of the oposition news- 
papers the adder tongue of faction, would have smiled to hear the 
suggestion that in Republican America, the party proscriptions 



13 

and excesses of Athens and Rome and Florence, without the 
slaughter, might be revived and repeated. Still less would it oc- 
cur to him that a Civil Service which a century ago in the whole 
Union included only two hundred and nine post-masters and a 
handful of other officers, whose tenure was their fidelity and 
efficiency, would suddenly rise like the Afrite from the casket in 
the Arabian tale, into a gigantic and towering form, but still the 
supple slave of reckless party power. The increase of population, 
the vast alien addition to the native stock, the universal extension 
of male adult suffrage, the growth of great cities of heterogene- 
ous citizenship, the opening of enormous opportunities of contracts 
and political money making, the vast consolidations of capital not 
hesitating to attempt for their purposes the bribery of legislatures, 
the paralysis of the national conscience for a generation in the 
defense by a great political party of a huge moral wrong, and 
finally a long and relentless civil war, — all these were yet to come, 
and their relation to an enormous increase of public patronage, 
and their influence upon the party system, could not be fore- 
told. 

These results, however, are now evident. What our fathers 
could not guess, we can see. Party which is properly simply the 
organization of citizens who agree in their views of public policy to 
secure the enactment of their views in law, has become what is well 
called a machine, which controls the political action of millions of 
Citizens who vote for candidates that the machine selects and for 
measures which the machine dictates or approves. Servility to 
party takes the place of individual independence of action. So 
completely does it consume political manhood that like men sud- 
denly hurried from their warm beds into the night air, shivering 
and chattering in the cold, even intelligent citizens who have pro- 
tested against their party machine as fraudulent and false, and an 
organized misrepresentation of the party conviction and will, declare 
that if their protest against the power of fraud and corruption does 
not avail and the party commands them to yield, they will bow 



H 

the- head and bend the knee in loyalty to fraud and corruption. 
The despotism of the machine is so absolute and the triumph of 
the party so supersedes the reason and person of the party, that 
we have now reached a point in oujt political development, when 
upon the most vital and pressing public questions parties do not 
even know their own opinions, and factions of the same party 
wrangle fiercely to determine by a majority what the party thinks 
and proposes. Meanwhile so completely has the conception of 
party, as merely a convenient but clumsy agent to promote cer- 
tain public objects, disappeared, that one of the chief journals of 
the country recently remarked, with entire gravity, that it found 
" no fault with conscientious independence in politics," which was 
like announcing with lofty forbearance that as a philosophic mor- 
\ alist, it found no fault with truth telling or honest dealing. 

The recent vivid and detailed picture of political corruption 
in Maryland, which we owe to the distinguished President of the 
Maryland Civil Service Reform Association, one of the earliest, 
most steadfast, and most effective advocates of reform, and its 
companion piece depicting political corruption in Pennsylvania 
by our devoted and undaunted friend of political reform, Mr. 
Herbert Welsh, whom ravaged .Indians bless, show how com- 
pletely in two great States the two great parties of the country by 
base and dishonest methods pervert their power from promoting 
the public benefit to fostering their own aggrandizement. I am 
not forgetting Burke's apothegm that we cannot draw an indict- 
ment against a nation. I am not arraigning the individual citizens 
who compose the great parties as guilty of bribery or corruption. 
As individuals they deprecate and denounce them. But as parti- 
sans they sustain the bribers and corrupters. The drivers of the 
machine are necessarily few, but they are also the drivers of the 
party, and substantially they are the party. The individual parti- 
san forced to excuse himself can only say that it is a bad business, 
but that his party machine is no worse than the other. This was 
the plea of Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of his party in the House 



*s 

of Representatives, who is said to have asked in a contested elec- 
tion case, " which is our damned rascal ? " in order that he might 
vote for the right wrong. So far as the mere fact is concerned, 
however, the plea that the other machine is equally bad is un- 
doubtedly sound. When Theodore Parker delivered his tremen- 
dous discourse on Daniel Webster, to which Rufus Choate's 
eulogy at Dartmouth College was the magnificent but pathetically 
futile reply, a fervent admirer of Webster declared, energetically, 
that Parker's discourse was the most outrageous deliverance he 
had ever heard, " and the worst of it is," he said, " that it is true." 
When the supporter of one party machine defends himself with 
the rueful apology that the other party machine is quite as bad, 
the worst of it is that it is true. ^ 

If I am telling the truth, it is plain that when the control of 
patronage passed from royal prerogative to popular party, the 
spirit and purpose of its exercise did not substantially change. A 
hundred years ago in England the king bought votes in Parlia- 
ment; to-day in America party buys votes at the polls. The party 
system has subjected the citizen to the machine, and its first great 
resource is the bribery fund of patronage. It is the skilful annual 
expenditure of sixty millions of public money in the national 
arena, and by that of thirty millions in the municipal contests of 
New York alone, not by educational arguments and appeals to 
reason, that the machine or the managers of parties attempt to se- 
cure or maintain their ascendancy. Tammany Hall defends itself 
as Hume defended the king. The plea of both is the same. The 
king must maintain the crown against the parliament, and he can 
do it only by corruption, said Hume. Party is necessary, says 
Tammany, but party organization can be made effective only by 
workers. Workers must be paid, and the patronage of the gov- 
ernment, that is to say the emolument of place, is the natural fund 
for such payment. This is the simple plea of the spoils system. 
It places every party on a wholly venal basis. Under its control 
party is no longer a combination of citizens for public ends; it is 



a trading company seeking the advantage of the leading partners. 
It is the selfishness of the individual, not the public spirit of the 
citizen, upon which it rests. And this view has various conse- 
quences. 

If public money may be properly given as a private reward, 
the givers may decide upon what terms it shall be given. This is 
frankly asserted by Tammany, and in this it speaks for every party 
machine. It asks plainly, why should not a judge who is elected 
by us for a term of years, with a salary of fifteen thousand dollars 
a year, and who except for us could not be elected, pay to 
Tammany the very moderate commission of ten thousand dollars 
for his election, which Tammany guarantees ? This is the doc- 
trine of political assessments in the Custom House and Post Office 
and every branch of the service. It is rent paid for the place. It 
is tribute to the party for the personal favor of appointment. 
"Why should not a man pay for benefits ? Why should not those 
who are elected to well-salaried offices," asks Tammany, " pay the 
expenses of the election ? Who are so much interested in the 
election as its beneficiaries ? " it inquires, and it asks candidly, be- 
cause the truth that the people ordain elections for their own bene- 
fit and not for the private advantange of the candidates, Tammany 
not only does not believe, but when stated does not comprehend. 
And this view of Tammany is the view not only of each party 
machine, but a large majority of both parties. Tammany is called 
a gang of public robbers without political principles, an obscene 
fungus fattening upon the political corruption engendered by a 
great city. But it is the natural spawn of the spoils system. It 
is the mirror in which party as now organized among us is re- 
flected, and when party contemplates the image of that dia- 
monded savage with his scalping knife of spoils it may well recall 
the title of Rossetti's picture, " How they met themselves." 

This sophistry of the spoils extends itself readily beyond 
elections and appointments and assessments in the Civil Service, 
not only into the whole political system, but into every depart- 



i7 

ment of the national life. It is undoubtedly true that, whether 
there were a spoils system or not, great interests of all kinds, in 
the pursuit of their own advantage, would always attempt to 
bribe legislatures, and that public officers and voters would still 
be bought at the polls. But it is not true that such attempts 
would be made or would succeed under all circumstances. Chol- 
era and typhus may not be wholly prevented by the wisest san- 
itary care. But cleanly, well drained, and prudent neighborhoods 
are much less exposed to their ravages than those which are 
abandoned to foulness of every kind and degree. The spoils sys- 
tem is a moral pestilence, bred of ignorance, carelessness and 
knavery, which invites corruption as filth invites disease. A com- 
munity which holds that a public office is a private benefit for 
which the recipient ought to pay, or that citizens of all parties in 
a free government may be justly taxed for the workers of a party, 
would hardly frown upon the proposition that the beneficiary of a 
law may properly pay for its passage. I do not say that the cases 
are exactly parallel, but the moral laxity and blindness in the one 
case would extend naturally and readily to the other. So long as 
it is held that the public money may be spent by a party for its 
own benefit, which means that in a country where party domi- 
nance should depend upon honest preference of its policy, the 
dominant party may properly pay sixty millions of dollars from 
the public treasury for votes, so long it will be as impossible to 
stem the corruption which threatens us on every side as to stay 
the resistless plunge of Niagara. 

We are approaching the third Presidential election since the 
League was organized. Does any intelligent observer doubt that 
the party of administration controlling the vast salary fund of the 
Civil Service, which is practically a corruption fund, enters upon 
the campaign with an immense but wholly illicit advantage? 
Like every administration party, it is justly entitled to every ad- 
vantage that arises from a wise policy, from the honest and effi- 
cient conduct of affairs, from strict adhesion — if it has ad- 



i8 

hered — to the promises by which it solicited public support, and 
from the faithful fulfillment — if it has fulfilled them — of voluntary 
executive pledges. To all these legitimate advantages the party 
is entitled. But so far as its administration has expended sixty 
millions of dollars in salaries with a view to the next election and 
to the continuance of the party in power, so far it has betrayed 
the principle of popular government, because so far it has delib- 
erately bought party support with public money. The disposition 
of that fund was committed to it in trust for the public welfare, and 
every cent of it which this administration has spent to advance a 
party interest has been spent in betrayal of a public trust. If the 
national patronage fund were six hundred millions of dollars in- 
stead of sixty, it is not impossible that, in the present develop- 
ment of the party system, the party of this administration, as of 
any other, by the shrewd expenditure of that sum might maintain^ 
itself in power. But the offense is not measured by figures. The 
abuse of a trust of sixty millions is morally as great as abuse of 
a trust ten times as large. 

It is not an abuse peculiar to this administration. There has 
been no administration since that of John Quincy Adams which 
has not done the same thing. It was long done amid general 
public apathy arising from the good-natured and careless feeling 
that it was the natural order of politics, the common law of par- . 
ties. It grew up gradually amid general ignorance of its tendency 
and public indifference. The spoils system may plead that, 
although a breach of the earlier tradition in national politics, it is 
really as old in New York and nearly as old in Pennsylvania as 
parties themselves, and that it has grown strong in general acqui- 
escence. But that is only to say that public evils and abuses do 
not arrest attention and arouse organized resistance until they are 
seen to be public perils. That is now distinctly seen, and this 
League is the living, active, aggressive witness of the happy 
awakening of the public mind to the fact that the prostitution oi 
patronage to the maintenance of party power imperils liberty to- 



day in a republic no less than the arbitrary will of a king imper- 
illed it in a monarchy. 

In appealing to public opinion to bind the executive power 
still more closely, by restricting the license of party in the interest 
of the whole people, we propose nothing which has not been often 
done. The very fact that party is a convenient agency, and that 
its disposition is to magnify its authority, is the conclusive reason 
for vigilant observation of its conduct and for wholesome checks 
upon its action. Party is a clever servant, like Steerforth's man 
Littimer in David Copperfield. But the cleverer he is the 
more insolent, if permitted, he is likely to become, and the more 
firmly he needs to be disciplined. Party is the servant of the 
people, but it is so clever that it tends to become practically mas- 
ter, and bullies the individual citizen as the clever Littimer set- 
ting the table and stirring the fire, overpowered with awe, poor 
little shrinking David. Those who grovel before the party as the 
courtiers in Siam crawl on their bellies before the king, forget that 
the people are really master and often break from their good- 
natured indifference to teach party its place. There is, for in- 
stance, in this country, a public opinion which has the force of 
law that the judicial bench, the tribunal of ultimate appeal even 
in questions of elections, whether the judges are appointed or 
elected, shall be independent of party partiality and influence, and 
it is a happy fact that the bench is so absolutely non-partisan that 
the infrequent exceptions to the rule, when they occur, justly 
startle the community as with a shock that threatens the founda- 
tions of social order. Another illustration of this suspicion of 
party is the condition frequently imposed by law upon the execu- 
tive appointment of Commissions charged with important public 
duties, that the members shall not be all drawn from one polit- 
ical party. But the most striking illustration of a sane public sen- 
timent which recoils from the abuse of executive power by party 
and of the intervention of the people to correct it, is found in the 
political history of New York, the State in which the spoils sys- 



20 

tem was introduced with the rise of parties under the Constitution, 
and which for the first twenty-five years of the century witnessed 
the worst excesses of party tyranny. 

When the State Constitution was adopted, in 1777, in order 
to curb the executive power, a Council of appointment for all State 
officers was elected by one house of the legislature from the mem- 
bers of the other, of which Council the Governor was made Pres- 
ident, with a casting vote. For some years before parties were 
definitely organized, its function was honestly discharged to the 
public satisfaction, and upon the true principles of the public ser- 
vice. Political removals was practically unknown until as par- 
ties arose under the Constitution, the Council of Appointment was 
swiftly transferred into a clean -sweeping party machine, and for 
the first twenty years of the century its action was merciless. In 
1820 the Council controlled about 15,000 appointments in a State 
where there were but 145,000 voters. A change in its party ma- 
jority inaugurated an orgy of plunder. The public service of the 
State after an election was looted like a Chinese city after its cap- 
ture by barbarians. The party proscription was complete, and 
among a healthy and vigorous people it became also intolerable. 
The evil wrought its own cure. There was a general demand for 
the abolition of the Council, and in 1821 109,000 votes against 
35,000 demanded its abolition, and the clean sweeping party ma- 
chine was destroyed by the unanimous vote of the Constitutional 
Convention. This was not a party victory, it was the act of the 
people regulating the executive power by curbing the arbitrary will 
of party. The appointing power was distributed among different 
agencies, where it still remains, and as its abuse by party, although 
greatly reduced, still remained under the changed form, the people 
still further abridged it by the Civil Service Reform law of 1883, 
a measure in direct and logical succession from Magna Charta 
and all the great muniments of political liberty. 

This is the law, which in its limited operation is an undis- 
puted benefit, that we would apply to every branch of the 



21 

public service, National, State and Municipal, to which it is ap- 
plicable. By restraining the arbitrary power of party we would 
promote honest administration of the Government. But when we 
say that our aim is honest government, we do not say that the 
Civil Service is dishonest. It is, therefore, no reply to our de- 
mand to allege that the percentage of loss to the Government in 
the collection of the revenue is inconsiderable. What we affirm is 
that the theory which regards places in the public service as 
prizes to be distributed after an election like plunder after a bat- 
tle, the theory which perverts public trusts into party spoils, 
making public employment dependent upon personal favor and 
not on proved merit, necessarily ruins the self-respect of public 
employees, destroys the function of party in a republic, prostitutes 
elections into a desperate strife for personal profit and degrades 
the national character by lowering the moral tone and standard of 
the country. 

Four years ago, as the Presidential election approached, the 
League stated in some detail the reasons for its dissatisfaction 
with the administration of that time. It tested the administration 
by the simple standard of reform, and all that it could say was 
that the scope of the classified service had been somewhat en- 
larged, and that the rules and regulations had been revised and 
improved. It declared that the general party change in the service 
which had followed the inauguration of the new President was 
not demanded by the welfare of the service itself, nor by any public 
advantage whatever, and was due solely to a partisan pressure 
for partisan objects, which unfortunately the President had not 
resisted. But it will not be forgotten not only that the party of 
the President had not demanded reform, but that its controlling 
sentiment was hostile to it. All that was done under the last ad- 
ministration, and what was done gave the question of reform a 
place in practical politics which it will not lose until the reform is 
fully achieved — was done by the President alone. Except for 
his courage and fidelity to his personal convictions, the reform 



22 

law of 1883 would have been practically nullified, and the reform 
ignored and discarded. Tried by the standard of absolute re- 
form, he failed as President Grant failed ten years before, and for 
the same reason — the hostility of his party. But tested by the 
actual situation of to-day, notwithstanding the executive yielding 
to party pressure, the pure flame of reform sentiment not only 
was not extinguished during the late administration, but burned 
more brightly in the public mind as the administration ended — 
burned so brightly, indeed, that the opposition party, in the plat- 
form upon which they carried the election, made the strongest 
profession of reform faith and purpose that any party ever made. 

The present administration came into power, not with the 
usual vague platitude upon the subject, but with a definite prom- 
ise of reform and the distinct pledge to fulfill its pledges. But it 
celebrated the success of its party with a wild debauch of spoils 
in which its promises and pledges were the meats and the drinks 
that were riotously consumed. Nevertheless, the reform law has 
been as faithfully observed as by its predecessor, and the scope of 
the reformed service has been greatly enlarged. The Secretary 
of the Navy, in the interest of the public, and he could have 
done his party also no greater service, has introduced the reform 
into the skilled and unskilled labor system of the navy yards. In 
his late speech in Rhode Island, a carefully and skilfully prepared 
defense of the administration and the strongest presentation of 
its claims to public confidence that probably will be made dur- 
ing the pending campaign, Secretary Tracy says: "I believe I 
am justified in saying that, so far as its administration is con- 
cerned, the navy has never been treated so little in the spirit of a 
party question as it is to-day; the regulations of the department 
within the last year have eradicated all political considerations 
from the employment of navy-yard labor, and have made that 
employment dependent alone upon the skill and efficiency of the 
workmen." 



23 

A more signal illustration of the practical progress of reform 
cannot be found, and when we add to this action of a Republican 
Secretary of the Navy the fact that a Democratic member of the 
House of Representatives has unanimously reported from the com- 
mittee of which he is chairman a bill to make the order of the 
Secretary in one Department the law in all Departments of the 
government, it is plain that the beneficent flame of reform of which 
I spoke is in no danger of extinction. The President has also 
somewhat extended the classified service, and has authorized open 
voluntary competitions for promotions, while the Postmaster-Gen- 
eral had already adopted the principle of competitive promotion 
in his department. It is the Post Office Department, however, 
the largest patronage branch of the government, which has been 
ruthlessly ravaged under this administration by the old abuse. At 
the same time, again, in the House of Representatives bills have 
been introduced regulating the appointment of all postmasters 
upon reform principles. 

Yet while this steady advance in one of the most fundamental 
of political reforms proceeds, the party platforms of the last year 
have barely mentioned it, and in the hot party campaigns of the 
autumn and of the spring, party orators have foreborne even to 
compliment it, lest haply some vote might be lost. The explana- 
tion of this apparent inconsistency and this evident avoidance and 
silence, is, however, not difficult. Civil Service reform proposes 
to restrict the arbitrary power of party. It does not, of course, 
contemplate the dissolution of parties or suppose that popular 
government will be carried on without the organization of citizens 
who desire to promote public policies upon which they agree. In- 
deed, the reform will necessarily promote the legitimate power of 
party by making it a representative of opinion to a degree, which 
under the spoils system, is impossible. But as party has now be- 
come largely a machine, oiled by bribery and corruption in the 
form of patronage and money, and as the result of elections is 



24 

coming, in the popular belief, not to indicate the popular will, but 
to signify merely the preponderance of "boodle" on one side or 
the other, party machines no more favor civil service reform than 
kings favor the restriction of the royal prerogative. 

But it is by party action, nevertheless, that reform must 
be secured. Why, then, do we anticipate success ? Because party 
itself is finally subject to public opinion, and whatever the machine 
may wish it is at last obliged to conform to public opinion as a 
sailing ship to the wind. There is already a peculiarly intelligent 
and influential reform opinion, an opinion with independent votes, 
of which party machines are conscious, and to which they now 
formally defer. It is an opinion which is known to public officers 
who often share it, and, taught by official experience the practical 
value of reform, they introduce it cautiously into their administra- 
tion. Once planted, like a vigorous sapling, it grows apace. The uni- 
form and undeniable excellence of the result strengthens and ex- 
tends the reform sentiment, and still further emboldens public 
officers to heed it. The futility of theoretical objections is shown 
by conclusive experiment, as when the first steamship crossed the 
ocean before Dr. Dionysus Lardner had finished demonstrating 
that it was impossible. The wiser and more independent senti- 
ment of party perceives the advantage to be gained by becoming 
the instrument of reform, as the wiser Whigs forty or fifty years 
ago strove to make their party an anti-slavery party, and, failing, 
saw their party disappear. Undoubtedly if the Republican party, 
born of that failure, had proved that it meant what it said of civil 
service reform in its recent platforms, it would enter upon the con- 
test of this year a more powerful party than it is. But its platform 
and the declarations of Republican leaders and its observance of 
the reform law, like the same observance and the reform acts of 
the late Democratic President, show in what way despite the 
machines public opinion, as it strengthens, prevails, and the good 



2$ 

work is done. The vigorous young sapling must encounter gales 
and frosts and droughts, but still it grows, and swells, and bur- 
geons. So feeling its way gradually, irregularly, inconsistently, 
halting and stumbling, but steadily advancing, reform proceeds. 

Party machines, truculent and defiant, resist, but like kings 
they yield at last to the people. The king whose arbitrary excesses 
produce the peremptory popular demand for relief ordains, how- 
ever reluctantly, a restriction that limits his power. So the French 
Bourbon, Louis the Eighteenth, signed the charter of 1814, and the 
Prussian Hohenzollern Frederic William the Fourth, summoned 
the Constituent Assembly of 1848. They call their surrender motu 
proprio, an act of their sovereign will. But they know, and the 
world knows, that it is the will of a greater sovereign than they, 
the will of the people. Our appeal is now, as it has always been, 
not to party, but to the people who are the masters of party. As 
the English Barons, in the phrase of an old English writer, cut the 
claws of John; as the English Parliament taught terribly the Eng- 
lish king that not he, but the English people, was the sovereign ; 
as the American colonies taught the English Parliament in turn 
that the American people would rule America, so by every law 
and custom demanded by public opinion, which restrains the ar- 
bitrary abuse of executive power by party, the American people 
are constantly teaching American parties that not the parties 
but the people rule. We cannot expect the king, nor the Parlia- 
ment, nor the party, to solicit the lesson or to enjoy the disci- 
pline. We cannot expect their supple courtiers either in the pal- 
ace or in the saloon, to demand that the king or the party shall 
be bound. But bound nevertheless they are, bound by the peo- 
ple they have been, and bound by the same power they will be. 
The record of this year, as of the last year, and of every year 
since the League was formed; even the reiterated pledges of 
platforms, although reiterated only to be largely broken ; the most 
sweet voices of the stump, that sink into barren silence ; the bills 



26 

introduced that gasp and die in committee, on the one hand ; and 
on the other the constantly larger scope of the reformed system 
in the public service, all reveal the ever stronger public purpose, 
and the constantly greater achievement of that purpose, to add in 
Civil Service Reform another golden link to the shining chain of 
historical precedents which by wisely restraining executive power 
promote the public welfare. 



Publications of the New York Civil- Service Reform Ass'n. 

The "Pendleton Bill." Bill to Regulate and Improve the Civil Service 
of the United States, as approved. 

What has been done in New York and may be done elsewhere. 

The Reform of the Civil Service. 

What is the Civil Service? 

A Primer of Civil-Service Reform. Per ioo, . $i oo 

The same in German. Per ioo, . $i oo 

Annual Report of the C.-S. R. A. of N, Y., May, 1883. 

The same for '85, '86, '87, '88, '89, '90, '91 and '92. 

Hon. Augustus Schoonmaker upon the Merit System. 

The Workingmen's Interest in Civil Service Reform. Address by 
Hon Henry A. Richmond, 

-Civil Service Reform, An address by Hon. Henry A. Richmond. 

Constitution and By-Laws of New York Association- 

Also a few copies of some early publications. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 

Civil Service in Great Britain. By Dorman B. Eaton. Per copy, 25 cts. 

The Competitive Test. By Edward' M. Shepard. Per copy, - 5 cts. 

The Meaning of Civil-Service Reform. By Edward O. Graves, 
Per copy, - - - - - . . 3 cts. 

Civil-Service Examinations. Being question papers with actual an- 
swers of successful and unsuccessful candidates. By R. R. Bowker. 
Per copy, ---....., I2 cts. 

Decisions and Opinions in Construction of the Civil Service Laws. 

Massachusetts Civil-Service Reform Act. 

Report of the U. S. Civil-Service Commission, 1884 and later. 

Report of the N. Y. Civil Service Commission, 1884. 

The same for '85 and following years. 

Also a few other miscellaneous publications. 

Orders for the publications will be filled by William Potts, Secretary, 
56 Wall St., New York, or by G. P. Putnam's Sons, 27 and 29 West 23d 
St., New York. 



PRESIDENT, 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 







SECRETARY & TREASURER 

WILLIAM POTTS. 



VICE-PRESIDENTS, 

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, HENRY HITCHCOCK, 

JOHN JAY, HENRY C. LEA, 

AUGUSTUS R. MACDONOUGH, FRANKLIN MACVEAGH, 

RT. REV. HENRY C. POTTER, RT. REV. STEPHEN N. RYAN, 

SEVERN TEACKLE WALLIS. 



WM. A. AIKEN, 
CHARLES J. BONAPARTE, 
SILAS W. BURT, 
EDWARD CARY, 
CHARLES COLLINS, 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 
RICHARD H. DANA, 
WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE, 
JOHN JAY, 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, 

WILLIAM G. LOW, 
W. W. MONTGOMERY, 
A. R. MACDONOUGH, 
SHERMAN S. ROGERS, 
CARL SCHURZ, 
EDWARD M. SHEPARD, 
MOORFIELD STOREY, 
EVERETT P. WHEELER, 
FREDERICK W. WH1TRIDGE, 



MORRILL WYMAN, JR. 

Office of the League, 

NO. 56 WALL ST., NEW YORK. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




005 900 009 3 









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